


Walk It Back

by DesertScribe



Category: Kraken - China Mieville
Genre: M/M, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 10:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20740739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Knacks can be learned by accident, and even coming back from the dead can become a reflex.





	Walk It Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).

The Chaos Nazis killed Dane twice, or at least that was what Dane told Billy afterward. It was true to a certain extent. The Chaos Nazis _had_ killed him twice. But then they had killed him twice more, and twice again after that, and then they had kept on going, killing Dane and then using their goddamned swastika to reel him back across the increasingly blurry line between the living and the dead. He could only remember the first two times with any clarity anyway. The rest bled together into a single flickering torturous mess that he didn't want to think about. He didn't want to think about those first two very much either, but two was a manageable number. Dane could live with the knowledge of having died twice and move on, and knowing a more accurate approximation of the real number wouldn't have done Billy any good anyway. Therefore, Dane said he died twice.

Knacking was all about bending reality in directions it was not inclined to go on its own, so maybe if he repeated the number often enough he could make it true.

By the time Dane and Billy stepped onto the Londonmancers' truck to be all too briefly reunited with the missing Kraken, Dane had already started believing the lie. So what if his hands still shook with the tremor of pain which had been walked back, rewound until it had never happened and yet could not be forgotten? He did not need steady hands to pray to his god, and they had bigger problems to worry about, like preventing the world being destroyed in all-consuming fire. Dane had a duty to attend to, so he steeled himself until the tremors stilled to almost nothing, like the stillness that hunted in the abyssal dark.

By the time Dane died again, he had managed to forget that there was a lie that needed believing. That should have been the end of it, but what Dane's mind forgot, his body remembered.

There were plenty of instances of people accidentally picking up new knacks through repetition. Dane himself had unintentionally taught Billy how to walk wrapped in shadows while dragging him around London in those early days of their acquaintance, and this was not so different than that. The Chaos Nazis had given Dane pain and death, and though neither they nor he had realized it at the time, they had also given him practice, lots of it, more than enough. Dane's body no longer needed the help of a turning chaos swastika. It did not even need a conscious will to tell reality how to realign. It had travelled the path from death back into life often enough that it could do it on its own now, by pure reflex, no outside direction or assistance required.

Slowly, awkwardly, all the broken pieces put themselves back together into a whole: the shape that they had been before being so rudely rent asunder from the inside out by Grisamentum's aerosolized attack and from the outside in by the gunfarmers' bullets. That shape felt right but also still felt like it was dying, so the body wound itself further back. The bite of a god could not be so easily undone as human and human-adjacent inflicted violence, not while the god in question or its relics still existed, but it could be… held at bay. The less than half-formed buds of tentacles retracted back into nonexistence. Cartilage solidified back into bone. Muscles and organs shrank down into human proportions and shape. Once-ruined lungs existentially twinged with the yearning to have another go at transforming into gills, but dogged knack held them in check enough for them to remain lungs, so they sullenly gasped in a breath of air and then another and another, until the body stopped being just a body and was once again a living Dane Parnell.

"Fuck," Dane half groaned, half sobbed. The last of the physical pain was already gone, undone along with the injuries which had caused it, but the aching knowledge of what he had been on his way to becoming only to have been brought up short and dragged back to the semblance of mere humanity burned through his soul as only the disappointment of unfulfilled potential could.

Silence was his only answer. The battle was over, had been for a long time, judging by the look and smell of things, and everyone else was dead. By all appearances, the world had not ended, at least not the world in general. Most of the pillars of Dane's personal existence, however, remained smashed beyond repair.

Dane rolled over and hauled himself up to his hands and knees, because it was easier to punch the ground from that position than from lying flat on his back. "Fuck," he said again, more forcefully this time. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." He slammed his too-human fist into the solid ground with each word, only to realize that his damaged knuckles were knitting themselves back together again whether he wanted them to or not. The fact that the beads of blood which shrank away to hide beneath undamaged skin were darkest sepia brown-black instead of bright hemoglobin red was of little consolation to him.

He did not allow himself to wallow in this misery for long, though. It was not in his nature. Instead, he picked himself, whispered funeral rites for his fallen fellow kraken-bit, and then went to see what remained for him out in the newly-saved world. By the time Collingswood and Baron arrived at the abandoned factory turned abandoned warzone with their cleanup crew to tidy away the evidence into something fit for the average Londoner's eyes, Dane was long gone. And is he carried his misery with him like invisible sackcloth and ashes as he went, then that was no one's business but his own.

* * *

Dane kept his distance for a while, but he could not bear to stay away forever. When he could no longer pretend that the waiting was for anyone's own good, Dane found Billy Harrow exactly where he expected to, giving tours at the Darwin Center, just like he had been when Dane first laid eyes on him. This time, however, when Billy noticed him lurking around on the periphery, Billy's eyes lit with recognition which Dane had not been certain he could expect in the aftermath of the time fire. Then there was the familiar spasm of time jerking to an awkward halt for everyone and everything around them as something more powerful than human knacking held it still long enough for Billy weave his way through the frozen tour group to Dane's side, grab him by the arm, and drag him into another room.

Time slipped back into motion around them. Muttered exclamations of surprise echoed through the museum from the people they had left behind, but Billy paid them no mind as he entered a security code on the electronic lock an unobtrusive side door and then pulled Dane through it into a Staff Only area. Then they were alone together in a hallway that was narrower and more disreputable looking than the parts of the museum that the public were allowed to see, and a closed door stood between the two of them and any potential witnesses.

Dane thought of asking Billy for explanations of what Dane had missed. He thought of asking if there was anything Billy wanted to know from Dane. But the thought which won out in that moment was that Billy had not forgotten him, that everything else in Dane's world had crumbled but Billy was still there, with his hands on both of Dane's shoulders now, with an inexplicable grateful look on his face as if someone had just given him a priceless treasure instead the last foot soldier of an extinct church. Then Dane stopped thinking and leaned down to close the last bit of distance between them and brought their lips together. He had little practice in matters resembling tenderness, but Dane did the best he could, ignored the incomprehensible secrets whispering to him from the ink-not-blood in his veins, and let Billy show him a way forward.

**The End**


End file.
